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Kamis, 10 Maret 2016

Latest modern science | Worst poster viewer - Si Bejo Science

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�I don�t have a question so much as a comment...�

Dave Levitan at Slate looks at the phenomenon of why people use question time at the end of presentations to not ask questions.

 �My question is the following statement� is the bane of any sane conference-goer�s existence. Any conference, panel, lecture, seminar, symposium, and so on, in any possible field you can imagine, can be the setting for this crime against humanity. The tendency of audience members to stand up and speechify rather than simply ask is remarkably widespread?�?anecdotally, everyone I know says they see it all the time, and everyone says they hate it.

There�s no single, simple answer why people do this, but it got me wondering: is there an equivalent behaviour in a poster session?

Oral presentations are designed to be a one time spiel by one speaker to many audience members, but a poster is designed to be shown many times to a small audience that comes and goes. An oral talk rarely offers the the opportunity for dialogue that a poster presentation does.

But in both formats, some audience members who will listen quietly while the presenter speaks. A few will interject questions as the talk goes along.

I can�t remember any time in a poster presentation where someone who I did not know wandered up to my poster and just made statements about unrelated things that had nothing to do with the poster.

I do realize, however, that my experience is limited. I�m a pretty tall, old guy, which can have the effect of filtering out a lot of interactions from other conference goers.

Has anyone encountered the �My question is the following statement� behaviour at a poster presentation? If not, what is the most annoying thing that a poster viewer has done to you in a poster presentation?

I think mine might be the poster viewer who just won�t leave.

Update: Here are answers to #WorstPosterViewer from Twitter:


External links

My Question Is the Following Statement

Jumat, 04 Maret 2016

Latest modern science | Critique double feature: Grunge vision - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s contributions come from Martin Rolfs. He�s kindly permitting me to show not one, but two posters. Click to enlarge!


This one was presented at the 2014 Vision Sciences Society meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida.

There�s a few notable elements here. First, the authors have put picture of themselves. I�m not a huge fan of this approach, but these photos are relatively unobtrusive, good images, and they help with the overall �street wall� aesthetic.

I love that the first part of the poster is titled, �What�s this about?�, which gets to the point and fits the informal graphic style of the poster. From there, things flow well to the experiment, results, and conclusion. I was a little unsure when I was supposed to read �Determining the time course� in the lower left corner, though.

Here�s the second poster, presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Belgrade, 2014.


This one is, in my mind, a little less successful than the first.

The poster again starts strong with �What this is about�. But after that, the reading order is less clear. Perhaps because this poster is in portrait orientation rather than landscape, the material on this poster is too crowded together. For example, the Y axis label is almost touching the arrow emerging from �Evidence for signal�. The results and the all important bottom line are not as clearly highlighted and differentiated as in the previous poster.

The colour scheme also feels less successful; the bright yellows feel a little too garish for my taste. Likewise, I think the idea of using red and green in the title is to exemplify chromatic contrast, but when I look at the title, I just think of Christmas. The colours in the title might violate the Sommese rule: type it, or show it, but don�t do both.

Martin�s posters are fascinating because they have a strong graphic sensibility, which is rare enough in academia. But even more rare is something that embraces grunge typography. Some examples of the form, courtesy of a Google image search:


This is not a neat look. There is splatter and rough edges. Despite the rough look, it takes skill to bring it all together. I appreciate Martin�s skill in creating such a strong visual identity for his posters.

External links

The rise and fall of grunge typography

Selasa, 01 Maret 2016

Latest modern science | Lucky seven! - Si Bejo Science

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This blog began seven years ago today. And it�s still one of my favourite projects. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it.

Picture by Lee Bryan on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Kamis, 25 Februari 2016

Latest modern science | Link roundup for February 2016 - Si Bejo Science

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I often use highways signs as metaphors for conference posters. This article describes the typeface selection for highways signs in the United States, and the decision to return to an older (possibly inferior) typeface. Hat tip to Amanda Krauss.

Speaking of highways signs, here�s how they might look if designed by academics:



Photo from Dan Taber at the recent AAAS meeting. Hat tip to Jamie Vernon.

The National Science Foundation has announced the winners of the annual visualization challenge, the Vizzies.



There are some nice ones there. I think this baldderwort image is close to the sweet spot for an academic conference poster.

What is it about pie charts that bring out the worst in design?



Vice magazine should know better than to make the thing above. Hat tip to Arthur Charpentier and Dawn Bazely.

Lenny Teytelman caught this rebellious moment:


There�s a longer post about the often confusing social media policies of research conferences here.

I just learned of Jane Richardson, who created a now standard way of drawing protein structure. Computers do it now, but her hand drawings are so lovely:


It�s a lovely example of how you have to think deeply about something to create a good graphic, but that good graphic can clarify so much for so many. Here�s a blog post and an interview with Richardson. She says:

Producing a good image is always a lot of work, making a single illustration that shows a point really well is always a challenge.

I still have to review Ellen Lupton�s How Posters Work, darn it. Meanwhile, here�s a summary of the book.

A list of logos that make good use of negative space. I do hope the UTRGV Vaquero starts making those lists one day.

Kamis, 18 Februari 2016

Latest modern science | Critique: Manta ray thoughts - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s contribution comes from Kenneth Chin. Click to enlarge!


Let me get to a couple of good things before moving to the ways it could be improved. First, the title is big and cannot be missed. If a title truly is 90% of your communication effort (as I�ve argued elsewhere), this poster is ahead of the game.

Second, there are lots of pictures of charismatic animals, including up at the top at eye level. It helps to have a subject that people generally like. I don�t know of anyone who hates manta rays.

Third, the main organization is a simple pair of columns. The reading order is not confusing.

That said, there are more frustrating things on this poster than good things. This poster is a compendium of common pitfalls.

There is way to much text, way too close together. That the poster is so dense calls attention to awkward dead spaces in the poster, shown in red below.


I tried a quick and dirty edit to move sections apart by shrinking the text and images a bit. I also took away the box around the conclusions and bar chart.

Even though the edit creates its own problems (makes alignment worse), it now has a little room to breath.

In the edit above, I flipped the order of the figures. Originally, Figure 7 appears on top of Figure 6. Also, there are two diagrams labelled �Figure 5.�

While the text is a clean sans serif, the bulk of it would be better in regular type instead of italics.

This poster needs to go back almost to the very beginning. The strongest course of action would be to give this poster a ruthless edit. Cut down the amount of material dramatically. Keep one big picture of a manta ray, show one graph of data, and list one to three major conclusions instead of nine(!).

But there is room for improvement even without going back that far in concept. Take off almost all the text and pictures. Make a grid. Draw lines for two evenly spaced columns, with a wide space between them, and wide margins. Make all those text and picture edges line up perfectly. Make sure every text block is an inch from pictures, and vice versa.

A clean two column layout is hidden deep in this poster; I can see hints of it. A disciplined adherence to a grid would reveal it, and leave an acceptable poster.

After I wrote all of the above, but before Kenneth had read it, he sent me a new version of his poster:


We�d converged on many of the same solutions! The major one is that the poster is now in two clean columns. Regarding the italicized text, he�s suffering form some mystery software glitch: they�re not supposed to be in italics.

Rabu, 17 Februari 2016

Latest modern science | Present your geology poster online! - Si Bejo Science

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Signal boost!

The American Geophysical Union just tweeted out  a link to a virtual poster competition for undergraduates. You have to sign up my 3 March 2016 for the spring round. Anyone who wants their poster critiqued beforehand... my email address is not hard to find.

Additional: When I retweeted the link, Terry McGlynn responded:

AGU meets in San Fran, too $$ for students. The fix? Just put them on the internet. They need a real network too!

This is a valid point. Is a �virtual poster session� the academic equivalent of the �kiddie pool�: intended to be a safe environment, but kind of demeaning at some point?

External links

American Geophysical Union virtual poster showcase
Conferences need students: make them affordable

Jumat, 12 Februari 2016

Latest modern science | Critique: Autotune - Si Bejo Science

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This week�s poster from Chris Cummins (used with permission) is not about correcting pop stars who cannot sing on key. This was presented at the computer science conference HiPEAC 2016. Click to enlarge!


My first reaction when I opened the file was, �A magazine cover!� The title band, the big graphic central graphic surrounded by short bursts of copy all look like a magazine to me. The biggest visual clue was the �5X speedup!� circle is very reminiscent of the sort of thing you see on magazines all the time. You can see this on this MacUser cover:


I enjoy the overall appearance of the poster so much that the tweaks I might suggest are fairly small.

The red highlights in the text are dark and potentially difficult to read. While it doesn�t do it in this case, red on blue together can cause an effect called stereopsis:






I tried lightening the textual highlights (�expensive,� �automate,� �Omnitune� just a bit to match the red in the �5X� circle:


The difference is subtle, but the reds aren�t vanishing into the dark blue behind them quite as much as before.

There are at least four fonts in play on this poster, which is more than I normally recommend. It works, though, as the you often see a lot of play on fonts in magazine covers.

The subheadings seem to be set in Impact. I might have tried looking for a different font, because Impact has been used so much in recent years that it�s starting to look a bit tired. Worse, Impact is almost universally used in LOLcats and memes, so that font might signal silliness more than serious scholarship. On the other hand, memes do say �Internet and computers,� so that might not be a bad thing for a poster on computation.

Like last week�s poster, this one doesn�t treat authors equally. Instead, it emphasizes who is the presenting author in two ways. First, it uses colour. Not only is the presenting author�s name in a highlight colour (red), the other authors�s names are put in alight gray, rather than white. Second, it uses contact information to emphasize who you should send questions to: only the presenting author�s name gets an email address.


Like a good magazine cover, this poster is great at saying to conference goers, �Hey you! Yes you! Come across the hall and read me!� The potential problem is that in a magazine, you can flip into the covers to find more depth and details in the actual articles. A poster can�t provide that. It�s difficult for me to tell whether an aficionado has the key details that he or she would like.


Stereopsis slide from here.
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